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Russian training methods and Russian sports science. Raise your hand if you (a) love these things but (b) don’t read Russian. Then you probably owe almost everything you know to Pavel Tsatsouline, THE great interpreter of that subject and almost the most influential voice in American exercise. Pavel created an appetite for English-language popularizations of Russian training research much greater than any one man can satisfy, even a pedagogical genius like Pavel. Today guest author “Dr. Smet,” a Russian-educated physician practicing abroad, takes us behind the curtain of Pavel’s latest book for a direct look at some of its source material. Dr. Smet’s blog Girevoy Sport After 40is required reading for lean solid dogs, lazy badasses,and grapplers and kettlebell competitors.He has graciously allowed me to cross-post his original piece.-Dog in Chief

Pavel Tsatsouline has finally published his long-awaited book on endurance training, the Quick and the Dead. Despite the hype, in the end I was underwhelmed. Don’t get me wrong: the book has useful information but, as it makes clear on the last page, it is a long infomercial for the StrongFirst Strong Endurance seminar.

Victor Nikolaevich Selouyanov (1946-2017)

The material in the book is based on the research of a few Russian sport scientists and coaches, most notably Victor Selouyanov, previously mentioned in my blog [Girevoy Sport After 40 -ed.] in the post “The Heart is not a Machine.” Selouyanov was a bit of a renegade, and because of disagreements with the science establishment he never completed his doctorate. Nevertheless, his contribution to the understanding of training endurance was invaluable, and Russian sports science is still bitterly divided between his followers and opponents.

Selouyanov wrote several books, among them two that are of interest to me: Physical Preparation of Grapplers and The Development of Local Muscular Endurance in Cyclical Sports. Both deal with endurance, and Selouyanov’s concepts allow a systematic approach to training endurance in pretty much any sport. I will briefly and loosely summarize the most relevant parts of the book for grapplers (my current love).

Muscle fibers

From practical point of view Selouyanov was talking about two distinct groups of muscle fibers: glycolytic and oxidative. Glycolitic muscles are capable of producing great force, but because they are not very good users of oxygen they get tired quickly – in a few seconds – and are not very useful for activity that requires endurance. Oxidative fibers, on the other hand, do not produce as much force, but are virtually impossible to fatigue in aerobic conditions. Their power production drops from maximal to about 80% and stays there for a long time.

What gets oxidative muscle fibers at the end is the accumulation of lactic acid and, more precisely, hydrogen ions and the resulting acidosis. It happens if the production of lactate exceeds its elimination, which happens when you demand too much work from your muscles.

Oxidative muscles are good users of oxygen because of large number of mitochondria in them. Mitochondria are “power stations” of the cell where oxidation – the reaction between various substrates and oxygen – occurs, which results in the regeneration of ATP, the fuel that feeds the muscle fiber and allows it to contract.

Therefore, in order to develop endurance you have to do two things: build myofibrills (units of which muscle fibers are composed) and build mitochondria around them.

Classification of training loads based on long term adaptation

Methods of training are aimed at changing the structure of muscle fibers in the skeletal and myocardial muscle, as well as other systems (endocrine, for example). Every method is determined by several parameters that reflect the external features of a given activity: intensity of contraction, intensity of exercise, duration (repetition, series of the actual duration of exercise), rest interval and the number of sets or series (explained later). Each method activates internal processes which reflect immediate biochemical and physiological effects of a given training method. The final result is long term adaptation, which is the actual goal of using a particular training method.

For the sake of brevity I won’t spend much time on the internal processes elicited by each training method. I assume everyone reading this is a practitioner and is more interested in the description of the method and the long term adaptation it causes.

And so the methods are classified as follows.

1. EXERCISES OF MAXIMAL POWER

External features:

Intensity of contraction – 90 – 100%

Intensity of exercise – 10 – 100%.

Barbell squats and bench press, for example, are activities with low intensity of exercise, but high intensity of muscle contraction. Throws performed with the wrestling dummy in high tempo and low rest intervals is the example of high intensity of both muscular contraction and exercise.

Duration – usually short

Strength exercises are usually done for 1 – 4 repetitions

Speed-strength activity – up to 10 reps

Speed exercises – 4 – 10 seconds

Rest intervals – depends:

For strength exercises – 3 – 5 minutes

Speed-strength exercises – 2 – 3 minutes

Speed exercises – 45 – 60 seconds

Number of series/sets depends on the goals.

So called “developing” sessions use 10 – 40 sets

Weekly frequency depends on the goals.

If the goal is to develop myofibrills in the muscle fiber the series is performed to failure

If the goal is to develop mitochondria the series are performed to light fatigue

You just witnessed a fairly common phenomenon seen in Russian literature: the discordance of content and the title. This is exactly how it is in the text: weekly frequency – to failure or not, depending etc. It doesn’t make sense, I know, but we will have to forgive the good professor. – Smet.

Long term adaptation.

If performed to failure, this method leads to the increase of myofibrills in glycolytic and intermediate muscle fibers

If done to mild fatigue – leads to the increased phosphorylation in glycolytic and intermediate fibers, eventually leading to the increase in mitochondria

2. EXERCISES OF NEAR MAXIMAL POWER

External features:

intensity of muscular contraction – 70 – 90%

intensity of exercise – 10 – 90%

Example – barbell squat or bench press done for more than 12 repetitions

If you increase the tempo of exercise and reduce the periods of contraction and relaxation of muscles, you turn these exercises into speed-strength type. Examples include jumping and throwing wrestling dummies

Duration:

generally 20 – 50 seconds

strength exercise are performed for more than 12 reps

speed strength exercises – 10 – 20 reps

speed exercises – 10 – 50 seconds

Rest intervals:

for strength exercises – more than 5 minutes

speed-strength activities – 2 – 3 minutes

speed activities – 2 – 9 minutes

Weekly frequency:

This method is aimed at increasing the power of anaerobic glycolysis

Currently there are no publications that demonstrate positive effect of near maximal exercises performed to failure.

However, numerous studies show deleterious effects from this type of exercise.

Long term adaptation:

most effective for increasing myofibrilles in glycolytic muscle fibers

no increase in mitochondria

If terminated well before failure or performed with pauses, this method leads to the development of mitochondria in glycolitic and intermediate fibers: there is no excessive acidosis in the muscle cell, and lactic acid is eliminated during rest.

There is a method used by Russian athletes, called 10×10. An example in the video below:

Grigor Chilingaryan, one of the specialists from the laboratory of sports adaptology that was founded by Prof. Selouyanov. Start at 3:00

The session consists of three exercises: pushups, jumps and pullups, all done for 10 reps in a circuit, for ten rounds, the intensity – about 80%. As you can see, the athlete never comes close to failure, and each rep is follower by a short rest – which gives the muscles a chance to get rid of lactic acid and avoid acidosis. This is the example of near maximal training without destroying the body. The coach recommends starting with lower rounds and building up gradually.

In our last post, we talked about “fragmenting the load,” a fancy way of saying that you should chop up your workload into small, easy chunks. Psychologically, you will enjoy it more, and physiologically it turns out that you can perform a much higher volume of work that way. (And volume is the magic variable for the lazy badass.)

Twenty years ago in a normal gym, if you were doing deadlifts, you stood out as an oddball. And if you deadlifted and did two sets of five, it was a dead give-away. To anyone else who followed Pavel “the evil Russian” Tsatsouline, it was as obvious as a facial tattoo saying, “Hey, comrade! I’ve been reading Power to the People!”

In his milestone book, Pavel said two things that were heretical in the American weight-training world of the 1990s, which was still ruled by the ideas of bodybuilders. First, he said that almost all of us—especially average people—should base our training on the deadlift. Not the mullet lift bench press and not the squat, but the much-feared, unjustly maligned deadlift. Second, and shockingly, he advised deadlifting almost every day. Bodybuilders would never dream of working a bodypart more than three times per week, at a maximum, and certainly not the deadlift. And many American powerlifters deadlifted at most twice a month. But Tsatsouline was coming from a different world, the world of Soviet sports science, with its time-honored technique of jacking up volume by using frequent workouts, modest weights, and lots of sets.

Specifically sets of five. In the Soviet tradition, five reps is almost a magic number. It occupies a sweet spot in the rep range. First, it keeps intensity modest. On a set of five, even if you go all-out, it’s hard to use much more than 80% intensity (meaning eighty percent of your 1-rep max). If you’re smart you’ll go even lower—mostly I’d stay close to 70%—but even if you get over-enthusiastic and add too much weight to the bar, as long as you’re doing sets of 5, you can’t overdo the intensity too badly. Think of the 5-rep set as a kind of circuit breaker that keeps intensity in the safe range.

Second, because sets of five are fairly short, you can hold good form. That is a very, very big deal. When people get injured while squatting, for example, you can usually blame it on fatigue. They’ll be 8 or 10 or 15 reps into a set, when the small postural muscles are tired and lazy, and their backs bow or their knees drift off track. Injury! But in a 5-rep set, you only need to hold your form and your mental focus together for considerably less than half a minute. Especially when using moderate weights. Less injury, less inflammation, and faster recovery. Over time, that means more volume, which means better training results. In sum, then, a five-rep set is short enough for perfect form and long enough to keep the weights reasonable.

As I got stronger in the deadlift, 5-rep sets of deadlifts got too tiring, so I dropped to “doubles and triples” (2-rep and 3-rep sets). But leave the doubles and triples to advanced athletes! You can get yourself in big trouble. Instead, if deadlifts are a problem, you can consider “block pulls” or “rack pulls.”

So in Pavel’s first famous protocol, he prescribed just two reasonable sets of five, every Monday through Friday. Like most of his programs, he called for just “one pull, one press.” The workouts were short, lasting about 20 minutes, and refreshing. If you were following the program correctly, you really would end up feeling stronger and peppier at the end than the beginning. In fact, Pavel avoided even calling them “workouts,” which connotes exhaustion, and instead told you to call them your “practice sessions.”

Here as in all lazy badass programs, you avoid fatigue. To use another favorite metaphor, when you do fatiguing, high-intensity exercise, you are expending finite recovery resources, like withdrawing money from a bank account. It is fine to make a big “withdrawal” on game day, when something important is at stake. But you must not train like that regularly. In your day-to-day training, you deposit money into your account, with enlivening, invigorating practice sessions that are recoverable or even downright restorative.

Did Hemingway invigorate himself to run with the bulls in Pamplona by blowtorching his lungs doing Crossfit? Hell no. Papa knew how to pace himself.

Part 5 in our series “Tao of the Lazy Badass.” Find the first four installments here, here, here, and here.

You already know the First Law of the Lazy Badass: “Do a lot of volume while minimizing fatigue.” Today we teach you how to minimize fatigue.

When you accumulate volume (i.e. total reps), you’re depositing money in the bank. The deposits seem small and insignificant, but you make them often and with no sense of sacrifice. That’s important: we want you refreshed by your workouts and recovered quickly. That way you’ll crave your next bout of exercise—you dirty endorphin junky!—and you’ll be fresh and ready to hit the iron or the trail again ASAP. That is why the lazy badass minimizes fatigue.

Sounds great in theory. But how do you maximize volume without also building up fatigue? Get ready, because here comes the second big secret …

Fragment the load

“That’s pretty gnomic,” you might be saying. “WTF does that mean?” It means that you should space out the work. Chop it into bite-sized pieces.

Let me start with an example of the WRONG way to do a lot of volume.

Gironda was not a tactful man.When the Iron Guru first met a young unknown named Schwarzenegger, who announced his intention to become Mr. Universe one day, Gironda sneered and retorted, “You look like a fat fuck to me.”

In popular muscle media, there’s a renaissance in people writing about “German Volume Training,” the (in)famous bodybuilding protocol that, despite its name, probably originated in Hollywood with Vince Gironda, preceptor to the young Arnold Schwartznegger and “Iron Guru” of bodybuilding in the 1950s and ‘60s.

Vince taught trainees to rack up a lot of volume—so far so good!—but he made them hurry through that at a breakneck pace with very little rest. He prescribed a whopping 100 total reps per exercise, done in 10 sets of 10 with just 30-60 seconds of rest in between. That’s massively fatiguing. And you have to settle for using wimpy weights, because you can’t complete that protocol with even moderate poundages. And you will need days to recover from it. And it’s the opposite of fun and refreshing. It takes great willpower to do it even one time, and you will NOT look forward to doing it again.

Fatigue sucks, and that’s why it is contrary to the Tao of the lazy badass to rush through volume with little rest, a thundering pulse, and buckets of sweat. To delay fatigue and accomplish more total work, the lazy badass fragments the load by breaking it up into many short sets. Instead of completing your sets and reps quickly, space them out. For example, instead of blowtorching the muscles with high-fatigue sets of 10 reps, an aspiring lazy badass could do the following:

Set up a clock near your kettlebell / barbell / whatever. At the top of every minute, do an easy 4 reps. That might only take you 10-20 seconds, and that’s fine. Rest for the remainder of the minute. At the top of the next minute, do your next four reps. Keep repeating, making haste slowly. While your friend attempts the German Volume protocol with his trachea on fire, you’ll be happy as a clam. As the minutes tick by, not only won’t you tire out, you might actually feel stronger and zestier than when you started.

Training “on the minute” is associated with Scott Sonnon, the martial artist who brought back exercise clubs in this country.

Your friend will be very lucky to complete his 100 reps at all; but you’ll cruise along contentedly, til after 25 minutes you’ve cranked out your 100 reps and gotten high on endorphins too. And if you start to tire before then and your heart rate starts to climb, no problem! Just drop down to 3 reps per minute. Or even 2 reps. There is no time limit here! Your only job is to accumulate volume, and there’s no penalty for doing it slowly.

This “on the minute” protocol is only one of the many proven ways for a lazy badass to fragment the load. In our next installment or two, we’ll talk about some of the other techniques. You can pick the one that suits your schedule and your pace the best. It makes little difference. They all follow the Tao of the Lazy Badass (which, once again, is to maximize volume and minimize fatigue) by breaking up the work into small, enjoyable packets with lots of rest smeared all over, like butter on pancakes.

It’s always some heavily muscled personal trainer. My toughest moments at Goruck challenges are when I must fireman’s carry a teammate, and it’s never the vegetarian triathlete who works for a socially conscious startup. I always get the dense, hypertrophied Paleo stevedore-type who runs a gym.

It’s amazingly easy to fireman’s carry someone, but it’s surpringly hard to keep it up for long. So today’s game was called “Desmond Down,” in honor of the barrel-chested personal trainer whom I had the horror honor of helping to carry for the last mile on Saturday, when he was suddenly designated a “casualty” by cadre fiat. I trudged up the Rock of Faeries shoulder-carrying the 150# sandbag.

You’d expect the climbing to be the worst part, and you’d be right, but I was surprised by just how hard–I’ll bet the last 150 vertical feet took close to an hour. And it wasn’t much easier to lift the bag onto the shoulder in the first place. In both cases, the golden rule seems to be keepyourhipsdirectly under thebag. “Duh,” right? But you can let the hips drift without noticing, and even a couple of inches increases the stress and heart rate.

I’ll do this one again, but not on rocky slopes. I have plenty of good training ideas that don’t risk falling on igneous rock, and if I had attempted this in the shallowly-treaded Goruck boots, I’d be blogging from Valhalla right now.

Long, Slow Distance

I hate to say this, but your single biggest priority is to create some modest aerobic base. If you were cursed by an evil genie to be allowed only one kind of exercise, it would need to be something aerobic.

Come on, Eighties, you’re better than this.

Why do I hate saying that? Because it sounds so 1980s, when America fetishized cardio to the neglect of all else and said we should avoid dietary fat and live on bagels and pasta.

But you get the most happiness, health, leanness, and energy from a modest dose of easy aerobic exercise.

And I really do mean easy. I’m talking a maximum heart rate of 180 minus your age. That’s nothing. Unless you have a good aerobic base already, that’s probably just a fast walk while swinging your arms.

And the great part is, you benefit MUCH more from that easy pace than by pushing yourself. If you care about why, read the writings of endurance super-coach Phil Maffetone. Maffetone trains elite athletes mostly or entirely in that 180 Minus Age zone, which is also where the endorphins and the bliss are. But whether or not you concern yourself with the “why?” the important point is this: by keeping your heart rate low, you IMPROVE the training effect. You are not compromising your training by going easy. You will outperform the people who train at too high a heart rate (which is almost everyone).

How do I figure out my heart rate?

The Polar FT1. It’s old, basic, debugged, and the least expensive of the reliable, useful ones. If Stalin had a heart rate monitor, it would be this one.

Buy a heart rate monitor. You’ll need to spend about $60 for an adequate, reliable basic model. Frugal to a fault, I seldom recommend throwing away money on wiz-bang fitness devices. But a heart rate monitor is one of the few exceptions. It really does help SO much that it’s a must-buy even for a tight-fisted Buddhist stoic who thinks that if the Red Army considered something an unnecessary frippery, you can too.

No, you don’t need to start running

Leonard’s Schwartz’s forgotten classic, Heavy Hands. Run, do not walk, to this book. Or at least power walk there.

So do I mean that you should start walking or running? Nope. Do anything that elevates your heart rate to that magic number and holds it there steadily. You can ride a bike, roller blade, paddle or row, ski or snowshoe, and you might also really like another obscure activity from the 80s called HeavyHands. Trust me on this one: HeavyHands is awesome and makes you feel incredible.

As a six-footer who weighed 185 lbs. and deadlifted 500, DeLorme was quite a specimen by 1940 standards.

As with radar, plastics, rocketry, and atomic energy, World War II also created modern physical therapy and the medical study of resistance training. A young doctor, Thomas DeLorme, found himself commissioned into the Army as an orthopedist responsible for rehabbing soldiers with leg injuries. As luck had it, DeLorme practiced a very unusual hobby for a medical gentleman–he was a weightlifter–and he quickly proved what now seems common sense: lifting weights gives size and strength to deconditioned muscles.

At the time, the medical establishment frowned on lifting weights as “overtiring” to the muscles and harmful to the heart. But DeLorme had once used resistance training to convalesce from rheumatic fever and in the Army he befriended a pair of his patients who were also experienced weightlifters and wanted to try rehabbing their legs with weights. DeLorme worked out a simple protocol that won his patients spectacular results and DeLorme a job at Harvard Medical School.

From a modern perspective, what stands out about DeLorme’s method is that he was blazing a trail down the road of the lazy badass. He invented a fool-proof way to accumulate Volume, the magic variable, by going easy and often. After finding (or simply guessing) his or her 10-rep max, the trainee did 3 sets of 10–first at 50% of the 10-rep max, then 75%, and finally 100%. Notice that we are talking here about the 10-rep max. When we convert these into the standard measure of Intensity, the one-rep max (1RM), we see that DeLorme was using very modest weights. I’d guess that average Intensity was scarcely 50% of 1RM.

That is about as light as you can get and still call it strength training. But that is where the magic happened. With such modest intensity, DeLorme could turn the volume way up. His trainees recovered from their light, refreshing workout quickly enough to repeat it the very next day, for a total of five days a week. At 150 reps per week in any given exercise, that is serious volume.

DeLorme worked out this curious set/rep scheme–one light set, one medium set, one somewhat heavy set–by trial and error. He admitted he didn’t know exactly why it worked. He surmised that the light and medium set were only acting as warmup sets and that only the heavy set made a real difference. But he was too smart to mess with success, and that is a good thing, because in hindsight, the volume is what makes this program effective. The light and medium sets are just barely heavy enough to matter, but they triple the program’s volume without adding much recovery cost.

Sgt. John Farbotnik, one of the two lifters who first worked with DeLorme when he was working out his protocol, went on to be Mr. America after the war.

Light and easy though the DeLorme protocol is, its high volume makes you big. In fact, it so happens that one of DeLorme’s first, experimental patients went on to become Mr. America!

This is still a winning protocol today for recreational trainees. Do it for deadlifts and one or two major exercises for the upper body (the bench press would be perfect) and take it away. It will take you almost no time to complete your workout, and to speed things up further, you can do your exercises in alternation: Deadlift, bench; deadlift, bench; deadlift, bench. Done!

“Like water, volume is soft and yielding. But volume will wear away rock, and it beats the crap out of excess fatigue. As a rule, volume wins over fatigue. This is another paradox: what is soft and voluminous is strong.”

from the lost training manual of Laozi (Lao-Tzu)

A difficult book, but the most important one I know.

In the most original book on training in decades, Pavel Tsatsouline describes a certifiable badass, a special operations ninja-type whom he pseudonymously calls “Victor.” Victor combines a pair of already-extraordinary feats into an extra-extraordinary combination: he runs ultra-marathons of up to 100 miles AND he does pullups with an extra 160# hanging from his waist. That’s a freakish level of endurance and world-class strength, a combination so rare as to seem impossible. (As we have said before, strength and endurance are rivals.) That is what makes Victor an elite among the elite, a certifiable badass.

To reach those heights, Victor trains in a very special way: lazily. Or to be more precise, with low fatigue. From his amazing accomplishments, you might suppose that he spends all day exercising and puking his guts out. Nope. Most days he works out for all of 30 minutes, much of it with a 24kg kettlebell, which is strictly a “Joe Average” weight, and some pushups and pull-ups and yoga. He left behind even low-key barbell training long ago, explaining that when he deadlifted, “I felt my ego pushing me harder and faster than my body wanted to go. So I decided to limit myself to one kettlebell and two [steel exercise] clubs …”

As the core of his lethargic-looking super-routine, Victor runs … sloooooowly. Slowly enough to breath only through his nose, with rhythm and relaxation. He writes:

“The key is … the LOW INTENSITY. I use a heart rate monitor, and I stay at 60% to 65% of my [max heart rate]. This means that I am often walking on the hills. If I ran [faster], my recovery time would be much longer.”

Allyson Felix knows the Tao of the lazy badass. Her coach, Barry Ross, keeps his athletes fresh and unfatigued in training. See Easy Strength.

Pavel and Victor are insistent: Victor is not succeeding in spite of his low-key training but precisely because he throttles back. Victor has perfected one way of applying the near-magical formula for productive and happy training: do as much work as possible while staying as fresh as possible.

Are those twelve words too much to remember? Then stencil this on your kettlebells, barbells, and running shoes: Volume Without Fatigue. That is the red thread that runs through many of the successful training philosophies out there, connecting disparate-looking approaches whose only apparent link is that they work well, and it is the subject of our next series, “Farewell to Fatigue: The Way of the Lazy Badass.”